Film Review: "Mrs. Winterbourne" (1996)

"YOU are a Winterbourne!"

Ladies and gentlemen, and anyone who is neither, time to bust out your best ugly straw hat with glued on flowers and look fancy, because we are viewing Mrs. Winterbourne!

I still remember seeing Mrs. Winterbourne in Kansas City with my parents. My mum didn’t think it was very good. Looking around the theatre, it was clear others felt the same way with their grumblings and commentary. The general consensus at the time seemed to be this movie was sloppy, silly, forgettable drivel.

Rewatching it in 2026, though? Perspective is a funny thing.

What people once saw as a bad 90’s movie now reads as something far more competent than we give it credit for. This is a professional and super slick film shot on literal film like the good old days, with real sets that look like people actually live in them, and anchored by an actual legend in Shirley MacLaine. Brendan Fraser is in peak form too, long before his Oscar-era renaissance and power returning to him post assault story. From today’s vantage point, it’s almost surreal to remember that Ricki Lake was considered the star draw over him. Weird, right? One look at this movie, you wonder what was up with that.

The premise is completely implausible. Any woman impersonating a dead man’s pregnant wife, then with her child as his grandchild, would have been hauled straight into a courtroom on fraud charges. That’s not a spoiler, friends, no, it’s the entire plot. And by the time things get especially tangled at the end, the idea that everyone would simply agree to a neat, happy resolution stretches my 90’s loving hunger for fun disbelief well past its breaking point.

Still, there’s something undeniably charming about the film’s excellent, and well missing these days, 90’s cheese. At one point the butler declares, “You’re just as much a Winterbourne as I am!” like we’re on The Brady Bunch. The pacing is neither slow nor fast. It simply exists, moving along to tell the story as movies used to be before everything went hyper.

That said, one of the weakest elements hasn’t aged well. The stereotypical Cuban butler feels like a relic of an era when characters from other countries existed almost exclusively as voiceless domestic staff, written as screenwriters’ vague ideas of what those people might be like and probably having met someone at a Cuban food truck once who said like, oh, “Have a good day sir!” As the guy rehearsed his order with “chicken and, I know a Spanish word, queso,” and the guy answered politely, “Si, señor.” I’m honestly surprised there wasn’t also a stereotypical maid. This is very much the downside of 90’s Hollywood, and it’s hard to ignore.

Then there’s the makeover. Ah yes, the 90’s makeover turning all young women severely into Golden Girls vibes, where a young woman is given thick, ageing makeup and a Medieval serf cereal bowl bob haircut to signal “sophistication.” Lindsay Lohan couldn’t escape this in The Parent Trap, and neither can Ricki Lake here, but at least Lindsay’s bob was cuter, and she skipped the thick, brown-red lipstick. As someone who has personally endured the “senior citizen cereal bowl haircut” and layers of dry, mustard-yellow foundation as a “makeover!” while still extremely young once, I can confidently say: no woman would be, was, and ever is thrilled with this transformation. Ricki Lake’s fake Mrs. Winterbourne is dressed and styled for early retirement and the bingo club, not elegance. Not bringing out her best self. Hollywood and media, quit doing this to younger ladies.

Romantically, things move at the speed of light. She falls in love with the dead man’s brother. Um, sure. He falls in love with her. OK. Good? Nobody questions the inappropriateness of this. Odd is the kindest word.

The film seems convinced that wealthy people wear sunbonnets with flowers attached. Ricki Lake herself is eventually given the hat treatment to help her “fit in.” I promise you, the elite of Boston are not wandering around dressed like Mother Goose nursery rhyme characters.

Critically, the film is savaged hard by today’s viewers: a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes is overdoing it to me. Financially, it earned around $10 million on a $25 million budget which is not great, but perhaps not helped by a trailer that gave away the entire plot. Ricki Lake, while right for some roles, may not have been the most compelling choice here. She’s pretty one dimensional and doing her best “awwww, I’m just a simple girl from Jersey!” Jersey, New Jersey, not the European one, but that would be a fun film for a mixup, wouldn’t it? The film might have benefited from someone like Elizabeth Berkley, an actress a little sharper, a little more convincing in the deception.

There’s also an identical twin brother, lifted straight from soap opera parody territory, because of course there is. Hi, Brendan Fraser.

All that said: Mrs. Winterbourne isn’t bad. Not at all. It’s perfectly fine and silly. It passes the time. And maybe my fondness for viewing it again says more about me than the movie. After all, I’m probably now the exact age at which the filmmakers would assume I need a floral hat, horrible six inch thick makeup, and that cereal bowl haircut. Unsophisticated me would have hair too long and look too young for setting foot in that manor.

Watch it, why not, if you’re bored?

This poster doesn’t show the damage of how bad that heavy makeup is, and I suppose when you start noticing things like that when you need to be watching the movie, that explains the net losses for the production!

February 14, 2026 update: For clarification, some of my background actually is Spanish as in from Spain. Before you go, “Hate on Nicole for speaking about a Cuban character poorly portrayed in Mrs. Winterbourne!” I can talk about Spanish language issues of bad stereotypes in cinema. Remember, Spain is in Europe! 🙄 Looking at you, guy who told me you “got lost in a ‘Spanish' area.” I promise you, the USA has no such “Spanish area.” Spaniards are not Latin Americans. American pals out there, please quit calling everyone “Spanish” who knows Spanish or is of a background from Central or South America. You can be Spanish and be from places in Latin America; not everyone hailing from those origins is, or likes people erasing their indigenous and/or Afro cultures. Spaniards from Spain come in every shade of white, brown, and black. Calling all people “Hispanic” is weird because that’s like calling the Maori people of New Zealand “English” because their land and language fell under the control and eventual erasure of British rule. End history lesson in 10 seconds of reading for the day. ❤️